Orasi Medical Inc. partners with pharmaceutical giant Novartis

Orasi Medical Inc. continued its string of impressive partnerships, this time striking a licensing deal with Swiss pharma giant Novartis AG.

Novartis, which generated $45.1 billion in sales last year, will use Orasi’s technology to speed the development of drugs to treat brain diseases like Parkinson’s and schizophrenia.

“There is an absolute urgent need for better tools to measure the effect of [central nervous system] drugs earlier in the drug development process,” Dr. Ajay Verma, vice president, neuroscience and ophthalmology at Novartis, said a statement. “We hope that through the use of the Orasi Index and the development of novel biomarkers that we will be able to gain additional insight into the effects and mechanisms of CNS compounds in our pipeline.”

Spun out of the University of Minnesota, Orasi has developed technology that can help drug firms determine if their therapies are working by comparing brain scans of patients with neurological diseases to its image database of people with normal brain activity.

Orasi says it owns the largest commercial database of magnetoencephalography (MEG) scans and is the only provider of MEG biomarkers — the genetic clues scientists use to identify diseases. Drug companies can determine whether or not to pursue a therapy rather than spend billions of dollars on a drug that has a high likelihood of failure.

In June, Orasi said Danish drugmaker H. Lundbeck A/S would use its software to test experimental drug compounds on the human brain.